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PROFILE SHOP JOBS PROPERTY CLASSIFIEDS

From The Times

September 19, 2008

Richard Wright of Pink Floyd was the exception to the
rule

Richard Wright, the
keyboard player of Pink Floyd, who died this week, gave his last interview to
Paul Sexton

Which one’s Pink, they used to ask. Sadly, it took the early death of their
keyboard player and co-founder to make people ask: which one’s Rick?

Richard Wright, who died on Monday at 65, was the mystery inside the enigma
of Pink Floyd. If his profile had been any lower, he could have been reported
missing. He was the unostentatious exception to the rule of rock stardom, rarely
recognised beyond the obsessive fan base of a group so huge that they have sold
three million albums in the UK this decade, without even making a new album for
14 years. He liked that anonymity just fine.

Like Charlie Watts with the Stones, Rick Wright just turned up when he was
asked to and played brilliantly. To paraphrase Watts, one year’s playing and 39
years’ hanging about. Yet the outpouring of appreciation for him this week has
been intense. One message board contributor said: “I’ve never met you, but
you’ve been a huge part of my life for 40 years.”

Wright himself was baffled. “God, I don’t understand the whole cult of
Floyd,” he told me. “I think all you writers need to talk about that. I know
we’ve made some great songs and great music, but I can’t tell you why we’re so
popular.”

Pink
Floyd at the Rainbow, 1972

Shrill shrieks, notes and even at one time the sepulchral tones
of Malcolm Muggeridge reverberate around the hall

Light
and sound: Pink Floyd at the Albert Hall

Related Links

Richard
Wright’s Greatest Hits: 10 Pink Floyd Classics

Pink
Floyd's Richard Wright dies

Rick
Wright

Guy Pratt, who in 1987 inherited Roger Waters’s bass part on stage after his
toxic departure from Floyd, says: “It took a while to get to know him, but he
did get very close to people, especially around the band.” Pratt would later
marry Gala, Wright’s daughter from the first of three marriages (to Juliette
Gale, whom he wed in 1964) before the group was formed.

“He was a very quiet man, he was happiest on his boat. That was the nicest
place to see him, because he was in charge there. Some bands spawn real families
around them and some don’t, and Floyd did. For me, that turned into something
else. It’s strange to think that I knew my father-in-law before I knew my wife.”

In the summer of 2007 I went to Wright’s modest mews house in Kensington, at
the time of the 40th anniversary of Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates
of Dawn, for what turned out to be Wright’s last interview. A slight figure,
he had been grey for years so seemed not to have aged much beyond a few more
lines on his face. As I arrived he was playing the album to himself, as if even
he couldn’t quite believe that those were his keyboards bringing a jazz
sensibility to Britain’s most avant-garde new scenesters of the day.

“Very interesting to listen to it,” he mused in his quiet, absent-mindedly
mischievous way. “Now I know why it had an influence on so many bands. I can
hear punk stuff going on in there.”

Wright may have seemed wary of the interview environment at first, but,
having committed to it, clearly wanted it to be as natural as possible. When his
publicist, keen to monitor the conversation for inadvertent controversies, said
she would sit out of the way in his kitchen, he said “Yes, but I’ll still be
able to see you,” and sent her out of the house altogether.

When Wright blew the dust off his memories of the pre-Floyd years, his future
role began to make perfect sense. “I’m trying to think how it all started,” he
said, as if the question had never been asked before. “Roger had his guitar and
wanted to become a musician, Nick Mason wanted to be an architect but had played
drums with various groups.”

As a child, he played trumpet, trombone and then guitar as well as piano.
“When I left school, my careers master said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I said:
‘I have no idea, but I want to play music,’ and he said: ‘Well, you’re pretty
good at drawing, go to architecture school.’ So I went, but I wasn’t interested
in architecture at all. I was into forming shapes, but I wanted to be a
musician.

“So when I was at polytechnic, I went off and had private lessons in
composition at the Eric Gilder School of Music, then I went to the London School
of Music; all this while I was studying architecture.

“The tutor came up to me and said: ‘You’re not into architecture, are you?’ I
said: ‘No.’ He said: ‘It’s a waste of time you coming; go off and be a
musician.’ But thank God I went there, because that’s where I met Roger and
Nick.”

Pratt says: “His playing was very structural, maybe because they were
architecture students. When he was on my bedroom wall in that 1970s age of
jazz-fusion and pointless virtuosity, his subtle injection of a few chords made
you see the relevance of jazz to one’s own musical world. He was responsible for
me and millions of people investigating Miles Davis.”

More than that, he smuggled Davis into the group. “There was a Making of
Dark Side of the Moon documentary,” Pratt goes on, “and he came up with one
little gem on there, that the chords for Breathe came from Kind of
Blue. Then you listened again and thought, ‘It’s true’.”

Wright said at the time: “I don’t want to be the fastest pianist on the
planet, I don’t want to be Dizzy Gillespie, who could play a zillion notes a
bar, I’d like to be Miles, who can play one note a bar.”

Wright was as quick to apportion praise elsewhere as he was keen to deflect
it from himself. “I don’t remember the first time I met Syd Barrett. Roger knew
him from Cambridge. I do have memories of sitting down with him in Highgate
working out songs and being completely awe-struck by this personality that was
Syd.

“He was so vibrant. It’s hard to talk about Syd, but he was unique, he had an
incredible way of looking at things. One day he wrote a song in ten minutes. Me,
an aspiring songwriter, I couldn’t believe it.” He took Barrett’s
self-destruction and inevitable firing from the band particularly badly. “I
think he was being spiked, quite honestly, with too much acid. Syd was obviously
losing it, yet we all loved him dearly, and had so much respect for what he’d
done.

“That’s why David [Gilmour] came into the band, the idea being we’d have a
second guitarist and then do a Beach Boys thing and Syd could stay at home [like
Brian Wilson] and write songs, and we’d go out and play them. Didn’t work,
unfortunately. Very, very sad.

“But I remember when David Bowie came and guested when I was playing with
David. He was a huge fan, and said when he heard Syd, he realised it was OK to
sing in an English accent. Damon Albarn said the same thing.”

Wright kept his counsel about the infamous power struggle within Floyd, in
which Waters edged him out of the group, only for Gilmour to reinstate him in
the post-Roger years. Their reunion at Live 8 was a means to a charitable end:
enjoyable, but unrepeatable.

“It was wonderful that we did it, because of all the arguments and issues
that Roger’s had with me, and with David. But we did learn something. It would
be very hard for the four of us to go together and do a world tour, simply
because our ideas are so different musically.”

But he clearly loved playing on the guitarist’s later solo albums and tours,
and it was mutual, as shown on the Live in Gdansk album and DVD, out next
week and featuring them together on a roof-raising 25-minute version of
Echoes.

“Musical telepathy,” Gilmour called it. “I’ve never played with anyone quite
like him,” he said. “In my view all the greatest Pink Floyd moments are the ones
where he’s in full flow. Without Us and Them and The Great Gig in the
Sky, both of which he wrote, what would Dark Side of the Moon have
been? And without his quiet touch, Wish You Were Here wouldn’t quite have
worked. It’s a mark of his modesty that those standing ovations on my tour in
2006 came as a huge surprise to him, though not to the rest of us.”

Pratt recalls: “David would pretend to forget to introduce him, and then when
he did the crowd would go bananas. It had us on the verge of tears every night.”

Having dabbled in two solo albums, in 1978 and 1994, Wright was pottering
with new songs when we spoke, developing an instrumental album on the piano.
When his cancer was diagnosed in December, he spent more time on his boat,
trying to get well.

He’d also given up some time to one of the writing sessions organsed by Chris
Difford of Squeeze at Huntsham Hall in Devon. The English singer-songwriter
Helen Boulding met him there.

“Rick came down with Guy Pratt and being a Pink Floyd fan I was so excited to
meet him,” she says. “As it turned out, I was put with Rick and Chris on the
first day to write, which was very exciting and very daunting, but it was one of
the most relaxed writing experiences I’ve ever had. Rick was the most gentle,
humble, down-to-earth guy. I couldn’t believe that someone so talented and so
successful was so low-key and gracious.”

If Wright ever was recognised, it was for the right reasons. “I really
appreciate that I can walk around the streets of London or anywhere and people
come up and say 'Thank you for your music.' Not 'Can I have your autograph?’
It's really nice,” he told me. “I don’t want to prove anything, I don't need to
go out and advertise myself. I don’t have the ego to do that.”

As we shook hands and he went about his business, his expression betrayed
just a hint of relief that a rare moment under the microscope was over.

Rick Wright plays on David Gilmour’s Live in Gdansk CD and DVD, released
on Monday by EMI

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